


your scars are healing wrong

by strongandlovestofic



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: (AKA neither married party cares but they ARE married and they are not poly), Background Jenna Stoeber/Simone de Rochefort, F/M, M/M, Past Simone de Rochefort/Patrick Gill, Vague Wild West AU, additional cw in the end notes bc they're spoilers, sort of but not actual adultery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22096570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strongandlovestofic/pseuds/strongandlovestofic
Summary: You are an incomplete person.
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	your scars are healing wrong

**Author's Note:**

> listen the idea sniped me and i entered a fugue state and wrote 3.8k words in 3 hours, thank you everyone in chat, you're all the true mvps
> 
> if you need/want content warnings, please see the endnotes.

You are an incomplete person.

She asks you your name, and when you don’t know she tells you your name is Timothy and you agree with her, and she frowns. She tells you her name is Simone and you nod, and she shakes her head and leaves you in… in a bed. You know what a bed is. Your hands are laying atop the quilt. You don’t recognize your hands. You raise them in front of your face and study them as though you were new to the earth, fresh born and aware of your limbs for the first time.

You walk like a colt when you rise.

She feeds you soup and cheese and bread and you eat, and something about that must be incorrect as well, because she swears under her breath and leaves you at the table.

The bed is large enough for the both of you, after you have eaten and after she’s handed you a razor and a towel and left you in the washroom.

Her hand glances over your jaw and then jerks away. You hadn’t shaved. You’d rubbed your fingers over your stubble and liked the feel of it, the sensation, like sand, and so you hadn’t shaved.

“Goddamnit,” she mutters, and she turns away from you. You study the long line of her back in the low light of the room, where the quilt doesn’t cover her. Her skin is pale. The chemise she is wearing nearly matches.

You realize that you’re naked. It hadn’t occurred to you earlier. You’d felt cold but you hadn’t put it together — the why of it. You know you’re naked now.

You roll onto your back and stare up at the ceiling. You remember beds and razors. You had not remembered your name, or your hands, or how to put one foot in front of the other, or what it meant to be naked.

You don’t know what that means.

==

There is a room in the cabin you’re not allowed to go. Simone wears the key to the door around her neck, so even if you ignored her frustrated warning to _leave it alone, I swear to God_, you’d not be able to open it.

You live on a homestead. She tells you that you’ll have to do, for now, and she asks if you know what to do with a plow, and you’re surprised to find that you do. You remember the weight of one in your hands, and she looks relieved for a moment before turning you outside.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” she says, and you don’t know if you’re imagining the way her voice cracks at the end.

You work the wide field around the cabin — your home? — until the sun is low in the sky, until your shoulders ache pleasantly. You hadn’t remembered how to walk yesterday, but your body seems to know this. Seems to remember. You slough off your button-down by the water pump and hold your head under the stream, shake yourself when you stand and wipe your face off, scrub at your hair.

“Wasting water?” Simone asks when you return inside, but she’s got a trace of a smile on her face, and she serves you a bowl of something that smells good, tastes hearty.

She doesn’t try to touch you that night.

==

You think you may have gotten hurt. Hit your head or something, lost yourself. Simone watches you sometimes, like she’s waiting for you to do something right — or something wrong, more likely. When she sends you outside to work, you think you’re both happiest.

She sends you into town too.

You’ve got a mare named Nugget and a wagon, and she gives you a list. Your hands remember their way around the horse tack, know how to hitch Nugget to the wagon.

Nugget holds herself tense when you’re working with her, like she doesn’t know you from Adam. Like if she weren’t such a good gal she’d try and shove you away. Once you’re seated at the front of the wagon she’s off though, knows the way to town better than you do. You don’t know the way. The road stretches out on either side of the homestead and you’d have gone east if she hadn’t have taken you west.

There’s a woman who works the counter at the general store. She looks at you all suspicious when you pass her Simone’s list, her cramped writing filling the paper nearly front and back. She calls you Timothy though, which still doesn’t fit with you. You don’t feel like a Timothy. You realize Simone hasn’t called you that since the first day, since you woke up. She doesn’t call you much, just tells you what to do and you do it.

Jenna — the woman’s name is Jenna — seems to know you though, or knows Timothy. “I can’t give you all of this,” she says, “and Simone knows it. Go down the street for the rest.”

The general store is at the end of the stretch of road. Down the street are a series of doors that you’d passed and known nothing about. She passes you the list with half the items crossed out in dark ink and you stand still, trying to think of how you ask where to go. If you’re supposed to know.

“Goddamn, how fresh are you?” Jenna sighs, and she tells you to head down four doors on the opposite side of the street, to Laura’s.

Fresh. Like a babe, swaddled and unaware. You’re aware, you just — don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Her directions take you to a store full of tack and feed, attached to a modest stable in the back. There’s a man with his back to you, and he doesn’t turn when you enter. His sleeves are rolled up his arms, held in place with bands, and when he does finally greet you his shirt stretches across his chest. Just a hair too small. You’re staring.

You stare at his face instead. He’s got a weak jaw and a mustache, and he pushes his glasses up his nose and gives you a smile. “Hey, welcome. What can I do ya’ for?”

You stare at his smile. Lick your lips and then — right. Right. You pass him the list. “You’re — Laura?”

He laughs, and it’s the first time you’ve heard somebody laugh. Since you woke up that day, you mean. Not the first time ever. You don’t think. “Her brother,” he says, and he takes the list from you and squints over his frames to read it. “Brian,” he says, and he glances up at you. He’s got a nice smile. “You new around here?”

You think _yes_ and then _no_, and then you say, “I don’t think so,” and he laughs at that so maybe you just told a joke.

He drops the list on the counter and starts plucking items from the shelves behind him. “You gotta name?”

Simone told you your name was Timothy. It’s what Jenna at the general store called you. It’s probably your name. It sits on you wrong, but maybe that’s just you. Maybe you’re just an uncomfortable kind of guy.

Brian comes around the counter and picks up a long, thick leather strap that you recognize as a replacement for the one for the plow you use on the farm. Drops it next to the collection of stuff he’s already gathered and leans against the counter in front of you. Close. “Did I stump you?”

“Yeah,” you say without thinking, looking at his easy smile, and when he laughs this time you stare at the long stretch of his throat as he throws his head back. You’ve never met somebody who laughs so easy. You don’t think you have. Not since you woke up.

“When you think of something, you come back and tell me, all right?” he orders, a playful twist to his mouth, and you lick your lips when you look at him, and you nod.

==

There’s a church on the edge of town. You hadn’t paid it much thought when you’d come but it pulls at you now, some little niggling thing at the edge of your perception. You slow the wagon and Nugget tosses her mane, and you look at the high double doors leading into the chapel.

You feel a bit like somebody who went to church. It feels familiar, moreso than the cabin does. Less than the weight of the plow in your hands though.

You climb off the seat and walk towards the doors, and when you’re climbing the steps one of ‘em throws open and a tall, thin man in black steps out, scowling. “I’ve told you before,” he says, his voice like small stones under wagon wheels, “you’re not welcome here. You or your witch of a wife.”

You nearly stumble back onto the dirt but you manage to keep upright. Stutter an apology to him and return to the wagon, urging Nugget forward once you’re seated. When you round the church, the way back to the homestead familiar if not fully known, something keeps tugging at your chest.

Around the back of the church is the cemetery, wooden crosses sticking outta the ground like feeble cacti. There aren’t too many graves, the town hasn’t been settled for that long. Some of the crosses look fairly new, even. One of them does. One of ‘em keeps grabbing your eye as you head down the road.

You realize it wasn’t the building that made you stop. It wasn’t the building that felt familiar.

You don’t stop at the cemetery.

==

You don’t ask Simone. She doesn’t talk to you much outside of telling you what you’re doing for the day, and even if you come back to the cabin in between tasks she’s usually not there. In the locked room, you figure. Something about… being a witch.

“I don’t remember much,” you say that night. You don’t normally talk during dinner. You talk even less than Simone does.

“Less and less,” she says, and she sounds mad when she says it, like she’s clenching her teeth. She digs her spoon around the edges of her bowl. “Less and — fucking less.”

She’s not mad at you. You don’t know how you’re so sure of that. She’s mad about… “Are we married?”

She barks a laugh, bitter. “Oh. Oh, I guess.” She drops the spoon into the bowl and leans back and looks at you, her eyes narrowed and sharp. She’s an attractive woman. Looks aren’t everything, but you’d get why you’d marry her. “Till death do us part,” she says, and she thinks that’s hilarious, because she sets to giggling. “I don’t need you to do anything tomorrow. Just need you out of the house.”

You nod, and you sure as hell don’t think about the cemetery when you’re lying in bed that night. You don’t think about death.

==

You saddle up Nugget and pass Jenna on the way into town in the morning. She’s walking and you offer her a ride to wherever she’s going, and she looks up at you from under her wide-brimmed hat and she purses her lips like she’s trying to decide if she’s gonna glare or smile.

“You were a good man, Timothy,” she says, her tone hard. A weird slip of the tongue. You aren’t thinking about it. “And I’ve loved your wife since before you met her.”

She’s carrying a basket with a bit of cloth falling out the top, and the top of a bottle, like she’s planned out a picnic. She called Simone your wife. “I don’t know her,” you say, and Jenna nods.

“You haven’t for a while. Doesn’t matter much. She just needs you walking around.”

“This is a fucking unnerving conversation,” you say, and she holds her hat to her head when she leans back, laughing. She’s got a good laugh. You bet it sounds good mixed with Simone’s. It’d sound real good, seems like.

“Go see Laura’s brother,” Jenna tells you. “New in town, from out east. He keeps asking everybody about you. Told me you don’t look like a Timothy.”

You’ve never seen yourself in a mirror. You don’t really know what you look like. You don’t feel like a Timothy though.

“See you around,” you say and Jenna nods, and she keeps walking towards the homestead. She’s wearing a pretty dress, real nice for a visit.

You hope she gets Simone to laugh.

==

You find Brian. He hollers a distracted hello until he sees it’s you, and then he gives you a smile like he’s been waiting.

“Jenna said you’d be by.” He hops over the counter like that’s a normal thing, his arms flexing prettily, and he leans back and looks you over. “Well, she said _Timothy_ would be by. You don’t strike me much as a Timothy.”

“That’d make two of us,” you tell him.

He pushes his glasses up his nose. “So what do I call you, Tim_no_thy?”

“God,” you laugh, and he hoots.

“Sacrilege! I’ll be thrown right out of church come Sunday.”

You’re not allowed in the church. The pastor made that quite clear. “Don’t go to church, so I can’t relate.”

He should wear bigger shirts, you think. He’s dressed like a kid who grew up too fast, didn’t expect to fill out his clothes so fast. You’re not staring at the wide stretch of his chest, just like you’re not following the line of his suspenders from the dips in his shoulders to his waist. “Practicing some heathenism up on Gill Farm, huh?”

“No helping that,” you say. Jenna had sure been prettied up. She’s loved your wife since before you were in the picture. God, you hope she can make Simone laugh. God, if you’re not reading the situation wrong — you hope she can make Simone feel less alone in that bed.

“I learned some things myself back east,” Brian says, and the warmth of his tone gets you — gets under your skin. Your face feels hot. “University. I’m overflowing with knowledge.”

“Now you’re here.” You tip your head towards the display of bridles. “What’re you using that knowledge for now?”

He holds your gaze. There’s no hiding the red of your face, how you feel it spreading down the back of your neck. You lick your lips and he follows the motion with his eyes. Mirrors it back to you. You can reasonably say you’ve never felt this before. Can’t remember a time when you have. Simone’s beautiful of course, but she’s sad, and she doesn’t seem to like you all that much. Seems disappointed with you more often than not.

“Practical applications?” you say, and he swallows.

“Yeah,” he says, and then, “Let me take you around back. Uh, to the stable.”

==

“Have you ever —” he says, his hands in your hair, his mouth moving across yours, across your jaw, to suck at the skin under your ear.

“No,” you say, and then more honestly, “Maybe,” and he laughs, and you curve your hands around his shoulders and gasp, hold him to you.

“I’ve,” he says, and he presses his forehead to your neck, letting out a hot, wet moan against your skin where your shirt’s come unbuttoned, “I usually know someone’s name.”

You drop a hand between you, where you’re pressed together, and you find heat and the dry slide of his cock against yours, and you take the both of you hand and listen to the way his voice breaks. “God,” you remind him, and he laughs and his teeth scrape against your skin.

==

You don’t run into Jenna on the way back. You think you might and you think you should feel some ounce of dread about it but — you don’t. You don’t feel much but satiated, but… Well, you’re smiling. You think you’re smiling.

“You look like you got into the cream,” Simone says when you walk in the door, so yeah, you must be smiling. She’s wearing a thin housecoat, soft-looking and shining, and you can see a trail of bruises across her collarbone. 

You hum and sit at the table, eat the food she’s laid out for you. She doesn’t have to do that. You could serve yourself, you could — hell, you could probably cook for yourself too. You think you know how to cook. But she does it for you. “Same could be said for you,” you say, and she hums, herself.

You lay next to her in bed after dinner, looking up at the ceiling. Her back’s to you but you don’t think she’s asleep.

“What’s my name?” you ask her, and she huffs.

“Timothy Gill. You know that.”

“I don’t,” you say, and she rolls onto her back.

“You sure as hell better. That’s what’s on the paperwork.”

“Paperwork?”

She turns to face you. You can see the bruises more clearly at this distance. She can likely see yours, too. You’d pressed into the meat of your armpit on the ride home, felt the tender skin where Brian had touched you. Kissed you. Bruised you. She hasn’t said anything about it.

“Timothy Gill owns this homestead,” she says. “You own this homestead.”

You don’t need to tell her you don’t remember that. She knows you don’t remember that. Just like she knows you don’t remember marrying her. Shit.

“You don’t — have to stay here with me. You know I don’t,” you say, and she pushes herself upright. Stares down at you. “You know I don’t know who the hell you are, Simone.”

She holds herself still for a long moment, her expression blank — until it twists. Until she snaps, “This is my home and by hell I’m losing it to some fucker with a dick and a _better claim_,” and she clambers out of the bed and stalks across the room. She fumbles with the key around her neck and starts to unlock the door you’re not allowed into and you — you follow her, you start to follow her, get close enough that she stops trying to open it.

“You could be,” you say, your words stumbling out of you, “you could be happy, I don’t make you happy, I don’t remember,” and she grabs your arm.

“You usually remember too much,” she says, her voice thick and wobbly. Her nails are digging into your skin. “It’s exhausting, you move between nothing and _knowing_ and this is the first time you know what’s useful but still don’t know anything, and it’s better, I thought it’d be better, but it’s just as bad in a different way.”

“What — what does that _mean_?” you ask her, and she reaches behind her and finds the doorknob, and she throws the door open.

==

You are an incomplete person.

You are an incomplete person because you are not alive, and you are not dead, and your name is Timothy Gill and you don’t know who that is.

You were buried nine months ago in the cemetery behind the town church, in a small ceremony in the evening because your wife craved privacy. Because you wife was able to claim that it was a mistake later, that you’d just fallen deathly ill, that they’d put you in the ground prematurely. That the bell she’d made sure was placed above the grave, with a string leading down to your cold finger, had rang. That she’d wailed and lamented above your final resting place until you made it clear you were awake.

After you’d recovered, the sickness had plagued your mind, made you stupid. Made you forgetful.

You stayed afflicted — some weeks you would know yourself well, know her, know your home and your horse and the town. Some weeks you were dumb as a babe, unable even to feed yourself.

Simone tells you this as she wraps the cord around your wrists, around the arms of the chair. As she brushes the hair from your forehead, gently, before placing a kiss on your brow. As she closes the door leading back into the cabin and locks it.

Your limbs feel heavy. You feel weak, as though you’re only half-awake. She’d picked something up from a shelf and shaken something powder-like onto her palm, and she’d blown it into your face. You’d breathed in, coughed, and then she’d asked you to sit and you had. She touches you carefully. Kindly. And tells you. 

You’d been thrown from Nugget on a ride back from town. You’d seemed fine — bruised and a bit worse for wear, but nothing permanent. It’d been a miracle. But your back had kept hurting, and you became feverish. The doctor said there was something in your blood, and they’d bled you to get it out.

Simone points to a jar on a shelf, one jar amongst many, full of something dark and brown. The other jars are full of — something, of, God, of creatures, many limbed and preserved. Of organs. There are books shoved between them haphazardly, like some kind of library of the damned.

It hadn’t worked. The fever didn’t break. You grew weak. She held your hands and told you that you couldn’t leave her, she’d have nothing, she’d be left widowed and landless and begging, and you had died anyway.

Until you hadn’t.

A miracle.

“Do you want me to remember you?” you ask, and she holds your face in her hands. She’s — oh, she’s crying.

“I need you to stop asking questions,” she says softly, “I need you to stop thinking there’s something _wrong_. You always think something’s wrong and that’s — that’s dangerous. I just need you to be him enough that it counts and to. To not ask questions.”

“I’m not Timothy,” you say, and she kisses you, a brief press of your mouths together.

“I know,” she says, “I know,” and she reaches down next to the chair and raises a knife. She. She raises a knife, and she holds it between you, and she says something you don’t understand. You don’t think it’s because you’re — broken. You just don’t know what the words are. You don’t think you’d ever understand them.

“Simone,” you say, and she doesn’t look at you. “You don’t need — I can. I can do better. I can fucking, fucking stop asking questions.”

“What’s your name?” she asks quietly, staring down at the knife in her hands, and you swallow. It’s Timothy. It should be Timothy.

“Can you tell me it’s — tell me it’s John next time. Or Rhys. I could. I could be a Patrick,” you say, and she laughs with a choke, and then she plunges the knife into your chest.

==

There’s a woman there when you wake up. She’s… she’s familiar. She feels familiar. You think you know her.

“Simone,” you say, and her expression twists into something you don’t understand. Like she’s happy. And not.

“What’s your name?” she asks you gently, touching your face, and you stare up at the cabin ceiling.

You remember a smiling face and a promise, to have and to hold and to build a home out west.

“Patrick,” you say, and her hand stills.

**Author's Note:**

> ♥♥♥
> 
> cw: necromancy, technical adultery (in the sense that simone and pat are married but they do not love each other, and they both have sex with and/or relationships with other people), character death, murder


End file.
